Rahsaan Roland Kirk released an album in 1973 titled Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle.
It features a live 21 minute saxaphone solo. When you listen to it, it's impossible to discern when the man took a breath. Incredible.

We are in the process of transitioning sections of Attensa.com to the MoveableType platform. Yesterday our crack web team showed me MoveableType Enterprise in action working on our servers. We're starting with the news section so that loading news releases, updating our news coverage and event schedule will be as easy as posting to this Typepad blog and there will be a feed for each section. I'll be working with this miracle. Incredible.

As part of Attensa's Project Dogfood we've been using BaseCamp and Central Desktop to manage projects and collaborate with partners. These tools definitely makes working with a distributed team easier. Both of these collaboration tools feature: milestones, to-do lists, file storage, messaging and Web feeds.

Apparently we aren't alone in experiencing the communication and collaboration benefits.

Benchmark Research recently completed a
sponsored research study looking at the returns from the use of collaboration
technology in the construction industry.

98% of collaboration technology users felt they
benefited from having information held centrally

93% of users said there was less chance of losing important documents

90% said it was easier to find and retrieve their documents.

I'd add, getting project updates in a Web feed makes it easier to stay on top of progress.

Gartner sees collective intelligence as the most important trend coming from the application of Web 2.0 technologies to solve business problems.

Here's the Gartner definition:

collective intelligence: an approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost effective way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

"That might be because Web 2.0 offers a sort of inverted way of looking at the way we do things now. Web 2.0 frequently embodies the emergent and freeform instead of the predefined and structured. It's often bottom-up instead of command-and-control. It's self-service instead of being mediated."

Both the Gartner report and Dion's analysis make the point that companies who have a clear vision and plan for putting social networking to work behind the firewall will have a clear competitive advantage.

Michael Arrington has created a phenomenon building his TechCrunch readership to 80 thousand in less than a year. Impressive.

Attensa's history with TechCrunch goes back to our launch last summer. Last Thursday we sat down with Marshall Kirkpatrick who recently joined the TechCrunch team. Marshall just moved to Portland and we were delighted connect and bring him up to date on our products and progress and talk about all things related to RSS, social networking, Web 2.0 business and where he should eat and drink now that he's here. We even offered to help him.

Marshall got right on it and posted on the Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 on Saturday. We really liked this line..."Attensa’s use of attention data in both its Attensa for Outlook and
Attensa Feedserver products is impressive now and the potential for the
future is really exciting. Just about any source of information can be
delivered by RSS and as the practice becomes more common we’re going to
need more sophisticated ways to take advantage of the medium." You can read the rest of "Attensa Offers Two Rich Enterprise Products here."

There's a project at Attensa called Project Dogfood. We've set up internal wikis and blogs to help us track fast moving projects, collaborate a little more cleanly and to give everyone on the team experience applying Enterprise 2.0 tools to our real world programs and projects.

Part of the motivation for Project Dogfood comes from our work with Six Apart. After sitting through three Business Blogging seminars, you can't help get caught up in Anil Dash's enthusiasm and wanting to apply the practical pointers on approaching business blogs that flow from DL Byron.

As part of Project Dogfood, I wanted to get more people involved in telling the Attensa story. I'd like to introduce Michelle, our customer service lead and author of the Flog Blog posts. I've asked Michelle to share her knowledge of Attensa for Outlook to help people get more out of the 1.5 beta.

We'll be sharing more about our learnings from Project Dogfood as soon as I flog the next victim into blogging.

Michael Gotta of the Burton Group sums up the role of Web feeds and attention in addressing two of the major issues facing IT organizations and information workers.

"Providing users with the right information, at the right time, in the right context has been the holy grail for IT organizations. At the same time, users have been frustrated with either too much information, too little information, information that isn't timely and information that isn't relevant."

Attensa is announcing two new products that address these issues head-on.

For enterprises and IT organizations, Attensa is introducing the Attensa Feed Server, the first Enterprise Feed Server Appliance. The Attensa Feed Server is an appliance that can be easily installed behind the firewall and enables IT administrators to easily set up and manage feeds for groups and individuals enabling improved collaboration and knowledge sharing.

For knowledge workers, Attensa is announcing the public beta of a new version of Attensa for Outlook, the first RSS reader utilizing AttentionStream technology to automatically prioritize information based on the user’s behavior history to automatically bring the most important RSS feeds and articles to the top.

At Syndicate in New York we gave a preview of Attensa for Outlook 1.5, the first version of Attensa for
Outlook that uses our AttentionStream technology to automatically and
intelligently prioritize RSS feeds and articles and bring the subscriptions and
articles you find most interesting to the top. We said the public beta
would be announced in June. We were off by about two weeks.

We are
opening the public beta today and we’d like to invite you to give Attensa for
Outlook a try.

Attensa’s
predictive ranking AttentionStream™ technology continuously observes and
analyzes explicit and implicit behavior as you read and process RSS articles.
By constantly analyzing AttentionStream™ data, including the time and
frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, RSS
articles can be displayed in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that
they will be of interest to you. Feed priorities are constantly refined as the
continuous stream of attention is processed.

Attensa for Outlook 1.5 lets you choose how you want your feeds and
articles presented.

Subscriptions can be displayed in a "River of News" view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds you
subscribe to.

Articles can be read in order of importance based on:

Priority – This view uses Predictive Ranking to intelligently predict which subscriptions and articles will be most important to you at any given time.

Favorites – Articles are displayed based on which subscriptions are read most frequently and consistently. In addition to viewing prioritized list based on AttentionStream analysis. You can manually rank feeds by simply dragging and dropping the subscription to the top or bottom of their subscription lists.

Date - This view displays articles based on the most recently updated newsfeeds.

Of course, you can also read their articles using a standard Outlook
view.

If
Outlook is the first application you open in the morning and the last one you close at
night, you need Attensa for Outlook, the RSS reader designed for business users
looking for an easy to use, secure RSS reader for Outlook that helps track and
monitor critical business information… automatically.

Participate
in the beta - Give and Get

Active
contributors to the beta program will get a free copy of the finished product.

Once you experiment with Attensa for Outlook you'll probably have suggestions for features and improvements. We've
set up an Attensa for
Outlook 1.5 beta forum where you can post bug reports and provide
feedback.

Three articles caught my attention this week and together they create a snapshot of the current state of affairs of Enterprise 2.0.

The first is BusinessWeek's CEO's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 written by Rob Hof. It's a terrific overview with examples of how innovative companies are using blogs, wikis, search and RSS to improve customer communications, overcome information overload and streamline collaboration. The article concludes with an observation by Tim O'Reilly that companies who embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies will outperfrom those who don't.

Next I read Enid Burns' piece on Executives Slow to See Value in Corporate Blogging on ClickZ. In a survey with 150 senior executive from Fortune 1000 companies only 5 percent
said they see corporate blogging as a communications medium; 3 percent
see it as a brand-building technique; and less than 1 percent see it as
a sales or lead-generation tool. Many respondents doubt the credibility
of blogs as a communications tool (62 percent); brand-building (74
percent) and a sales or lead generation channel (70 percent). Robbin Goodman, EVP and partner at Makovsky & Company, the firm that released the study, said in what may be the understatment of the week, "There is a learning curve that needs to take place." Robbin also points out "The benefits of blogging for a business can significantly outweigh possible risks."

I also listened to David Berlind's podcast Reality Check: Wikis? Sorry. Never Heard of Them. He turns the table on a technology tradeshow by interviewing the attendees instead of the exhibitors. His conclusion, technology executives who are beginning to explore these new technologies and tools are extremely clear on why they need to embrace the
newer technologies but they're just not sure what those
technologies are.

Taken together, the articles are a clear indication that companies including Attensa need to do a better job explaining the benefits of adopting our technologies. They also point out that technology executives who embrace Enterprise 2.0 tools early can have a significant competitive advantage.